The Varieties of Transformative Experience: Ethnographic Explorations

Ethos ◽  
2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Bregnbæk ◽  
Tine M. Gammeltoft
Keyword(s):  
Transformative Experience

scholarly journals After Hajj: Muslim Pilgrims Refashioning Themselves

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Kholoud Al-Ajarma
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Religious Behavior ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Community Expectations ◽  
Religious Dimensions ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
The Right ◽  
Self Formation ◽  
Do So

The Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj) is one of the five pillars of Islam and a duty which Muslims must perform—once in a lifetime—if they are physically and financially able to do so. In Morocco, from where thousands of pilgrims travel to Mecca every year, the Hajj often represents the culmination of years of preparation and planning, both spiritual and logistical. Pilgrims often describe their journey to Mecca as a transformative experience. Upon successfully completing the pilgrimage and returning home, pilgrims must negotiate their new status—and the expectations that come with it—within the mundane and complex reality of everyday life. There are many ambivalences and tensions to be dealt with, including managing the community expectations of piety and moral behavior. On a personal level, pilgrims struggle between staying on the right path, faithful to their pilgrimage experience, and straying from that path as a result of human imperfection and the inability to sustain the ideals inspired by pilgrimage. By ethnographically studying the everyday lives of Moroccans after their return from Mecca, this article seeks to answer the questions: how do pilgrims encounter a variety of competing expectations and demands following their pilgrimage and how are their efforts received by members of their community? How do they shape their social and religious behavior as returned pilgrims? How do they deal with the tensions between the ideals of Hajj and the realities of daily life? In short, this article scrutinizes the religious, social and personal ramifications for pilgrims after the completion of Hajj and return to their community. My research illustrates that pilgrimage contributes to a process of self-formation among pilgrims, with religious and non-religious dimensions, which continues long after Hajj is over and which operates within, and interacts with, specific social contexts.

scholarly journals Death: The Ultimate Transformative Experience

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Family Members ◽  
The State ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Whole Process ◽  
Fundamental Significance ◽  
Hospice Workers

Death is the ultimate transformative experience. “Death” here means not the state of being dead but rather the whole process of dying, culminating in the end of a person’s life. Death is “epistemically transformative” because you cannot know what it is like to die until you experience dying and this experience can enable you to understand things in a new way. Death is “personally transformative” because it changes how you experience yourself in ways that you cannot fully grasp before these changes happen. At the same time, death is unlike any other transformative experience. It is final, all encompassing, and has fundamental significance. Its power to reveal new truths about your self and your life is exceptional. It offers prospective and retrospective perspectives that differ from those of any other experience. This chapter examines death by describing its unique characteristics as the ultimate transformative experience. The practical benefit of this perspective is to suggest new philosophical resources for physicians, hospice workers, policy makers, and family members who care for dying loved ones.

scholarly journals Ecstatic Hymns: The Hymn’s Role in Encountering Mystery in Liturgical Worship

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Heeder
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The Mass’s music enables us to encounter God by being drawn out of ourselves by beauty. Thus, hymns form us ecstatically by engaging the intellectual, physical, and spiritual elements of our human nature to better know and love God as Mystery and Beauty Engaging the whole human person, singing enables us to offer God all of ourselves and so encounter God as Mystery. Drawing on the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar writes, this paper will reflect on how the beauty of song invites us into the Mystery of Beauty: God. Singing a hymn of praise is a transformative experience of beauty, which draws us out of ourselves, placing us in a posture in which we can encounter and be formed by God, and so more fully be able to encounter God, others, and ourselves.

Transforming Violence to Nonviolence

2017 ◽  
pp. 43-68
Author(s):  
Wayne A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
White Male ◽  
Diverse Population ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Mass Shootings ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Violent Acts

America can be a violent place. This country has a diverse population with a plethora of social problems including a significant level of violence that occurs in families, schools, churches, and other elements of society. Violence results in significant costs to family relationships, crime, health care, social services, education, race, religion and public policy. There have been many high-profile cases of violence especially mass shootings. On June 17, 2015 Dylan Roof, a young white male, fatally wounded 9 people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. What causes such violent acts? Are males more violent than females? What can be done to address the problem of violence? Violence often leads to more violence. Can a violent act, such as the Charleston shooting result in a transformative experience and outcome where the response offers lessons for a vision for nonviolence?

Can We Compare the Utilities of Different Selves?

2019 ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
Richard Pettigrew
Keyword(s):  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Interpersonal Utility Comparisons

This chapter asks whether we can compare the values of different selves of the same individual in such a way that we can measure those values on the same scale using utilities. It surveys a number of different proposals adapted from the literature on interpersonal utility comparisons, and concludes that none of the existing proposals will work. It presents an alternative and argues that it does work. This answers an objection raised by R. A. Briggs (2015),. ‘Transformative Experience and Interpersonal Utility Comparisons’ in Res Philosophica, 92(2).

Death

2020 ◽  
pp. 269-288
Author(s):  
Evan Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Family Members ◽  
The State ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Whole Process ◽  
Fundamental Significance ◽  
Hospice Workers

Death is the ultimate transformative experience. “Death” here means not the state of being dead but rather the whole process of dying, culminating in the end of a person’s life. Death is “epistemically transformative,” because you cannot know what it is like to die until you experience dying, and this experience can enable you to understand things in a new way. Death is “personally transformative,” because it changes how you experience yourself in ways that you cannot fully grasp before these changes happen. At the same time, death is unlike any other transformative experience. It is final, all-encompassing, and has fundamental significance. Its power to reveal new truths about your self and your life is exceptional. It offers prospective and retrospective perspectives that differ from those of any other experience. This chapter examines death by describing its unique characteristics as the ultimate transformative experience. The practical benefit of this perspective is to suggest new philosophical resources for physicians, hospice workers, policy-makers, and family members who care for dying loved ones.

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